Damon Binder is a senior researcher on the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team at Coefficient Giving. He has a PhD in physics from Princeton and previously studied existential risks at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
He joined Fin Moorhouse to discuss his series on the AI industrial explosion. Topics include:
- How input-output tables let you estimate how fast a self-replicating economy could grow if labor were free, yielding a headline result of roughly annual doubling, even under conservative assumptions and heavy regulation
- Why competition makes low-growth restraint unstable
- Why raw-material scarcity isn’t a hard barrier
- Why a fast-growing economy wants cheap, disposable, infrastructure
- Thermodynamic and other physical speed limits to physical growth
- Which biological organisms replicate fastest, and what we can learn from them
- Why physical output matters for hard power
- How Damon uses AI in his research
You can read a full transcript here.
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